Juan Williams, writing on the Fox News website, wants to see NPR defunded. What NPR exec Ron Schiller said in the recent video sting “is just an open microphone on what I’ve been hearing from NPR top executives and editors for years. They are willing to do anything in service to any liberal with money and then they will turn around and in self-righteous indignation claim that they have cleaner hands than anybody in the news business who accepts advertising or expresses a point of view.”
“The work of NPR’s many outstanding journalists is barely an afterthought to leadership with this mindset and obsessed with funding,” he says. “NPR has many, very good journalists. But they are caught in a game where they are trying to please a leadership that doesn’t want to hear stories that contradict the official point of view. I’m not just talking about conservatives but also the far-left, the poor, anybody who didn’t fit into leadership’s design of NPR as the official voice of comfortable, liberal-leaning upper-income America.”
“I’m still an NPR fan,” he notes, “but I’m no fan of the self-serving, self-righteous thinking that is at the top level of NPR in Washington and that has corrupted a once great brand.”